The vibe at the scene of the exhibit is one of fun, uncertainty, and tension. There were people chanting the annoying popular phrase, “He Will Not Divide Us!”, playing tambourines and other hippy instraments. And of course there were real life shitposters and trolls, as seen from their MAGA hats.

For the most part people were just shouting, chanting, and talking shit. Luckily it didn’t escalate. Cops were at the scene.

From his latest video on his periscope account we can see two people, one presumably a Trump supporter, the other a noticabely butthurt individual.

Two guys started chirping each other. Then a police man came over. This lead to the crowd erupting in a new chant of, “BLUE LIVES MATTER! BLUE LIVES MATTER!” A dig at the now defunct #BlackLivesMatter movement. That movement seemed to sort of disappear over night, strange eh?

I think Shia’s idea was stupid. To have people come up to a live stream and virtue signal to the masses. But what Shia doesn’t realise is that his passion for post-modern garbage has now created a new platform – giving people a free IRL Trolling Service.

It’s like a real life Twitter trolling thread came to life!

How much do you want to bet that this, “Exhibit” of his gets taken over by Trump supporters and is taken down within the first year…

(Scroll to the bottom for the most recent updates!)

Much of the internet appears to be broken. And it’s all because of one cyber attack.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack has taken down systems run by Dyn, Inc, one of the largest providers of internet services in the world. And as a result it seems to be causing problems for a variety of websites – including Reddit, Spotify and Twitter.

Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, and a huge swath of other websites were down or screwed up this morning. This was happening as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. It’s probably safe to assume that the two situations are related.

Update 12:28 PM EST: Dyn says it is investigating yet another attack, causing the same massive outages experienced this morning. Based on emails from Gizmodo readers, this new wave of attacks seems to be affecting the West Coast of the United States and Europe. It’s so far unclear how the two attacks are related, but the outages are very similar.

A list of websites that are currently down:

Here’s a list of websites that readers have told us they are having trouble accessing:

Some think the attack was a political conspiracy, like an attempt to take down the internet so that people wouldn’t be able to read the leaked Clinton emails on Wikileaks. Others think it’s the usual Russian assault. No matter who did it, we should expect incidents like this to get worse in the future. While DDoS attacks used to be a pretty weak threat, we’re entering a new era.

Maybe we can go back to old-timey living like farms, buggy and carriage, and that can-and-string thing we used to talk through. Simpler times.

Shit is getting real.

More updates to come!

UPDATE 5 (sort of): A fellow blogger dropped this in the comments. This isn’t new as this video was released on October 18th. But this is new to me. After watching this it certainly helps us connect some dots.

These complex and devastating problems are a result of multiple systems (botnets) target a single resource. This incoming traffic overwhelms that target, essentially shutting it down and preventing legitimate traffic from getting through. The target of today’s problem appears to be a major DNS (Domain Name Servers) Dyn. If your DNS can’t direct you to your favorite website, such as Pinterest or Etsy, then you’re not getting there.

For those not in the know, a DNS or Domain Name Servers fundamentally act as the tool that sees through a user’s request to access any given webpage ensuring that the internet user reaches the right destination. If you clicked on this article via a Twitter link or on Google, the DNS host used by Hacked took care of your request to then facilitate your access to this page. If our DNS provider is down, we’re out of luck in trying to get you to visit this website. It’s a pretty big deal.

Now I’ve got a better idea of what is going on. If you have any updates drop them in the comments below.

I’ll keep updating this post as long as this story (and me) have steam.

No one has claimed responsibility yet, says CNN. That hasn’t stopped the conspiracy theories from flying that Russia could be behind the attack or even that the United States perpetrated it in a “false flag” attack to blame Russia.

My bet is that it’s some shitlords just messing with us for the simple reason, because they can.

We may already know at least one method the hackers are using. According to security intelligence firm Flashpoint, their researchers have observed a Mirai botnet attacking Dyn…

…In previous incidents, botnets of more than 25,000 cameras have been used in attacks that often start in Asia, in particular China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. One Chinese camera-maker appears to have accounted for nearly half of the camera bots used in recent DDoS attacks.

The Internet of Things has been held up as the next big technology revolution that will lower business costs and make employees more productive, but it brings with it major baggage for corporate leaders.

Cybersecurity experts warn that IoT is one of the most vulnerable areas in the enterprise, and massive IoT device armies are one of the most effective ways to launch cyberattacks.

DDos attacks like this are really just the beginning

Only the beginning. Right, sure. Like our toasters are gonna come after us for all those times we burnt our poppy seed gluten free bagels.

Right now, civilization seems to be on the losing side, as researchers with Akamai say as many as two million devices have been taken over by hackers. And since most devices are designed to be left alone after being set up, it’s almost impossible for an average user to know their device has been compromised.

“There was an expectation with PCs that you would upgrade them over time, but there’s not that expectation with your toaster,” Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, told Business Insider. “Consumers and businesses are trained to install all of these devices and never think about them again. So if there is a vulnerability, getting those vulnerabilities fixed is the real challenge.”

Members of a shadowy hacker collective that calls itself New World Hackers claimed responsibility for the attack via Twitter. They said they organized networks of connected “zombie” computers that threw a staggering 1.2 terabits per second of data at the Dyn-managed servers.

“We didn’t do this to attract federal agents, only test power,” two collective members who identified themselves as “Prophet” and “Zain” told an AP reporter via Twitter direct message exchange. They said more than 10 member participated in the attack. It was not immediately possible to verify the claim.

Testing the power. Well I think they passed with flying colours. Internet security however, failed miserably.